A Poem by Gabrielle Myers

You Can’t Fly into a Mouth Filled with Past Fears of Burning

 

Let dust rise thirteen feet high behind our car wheels;

Let withered lupine give their seeds to dry soil;

Let red worms spin down to find moisture near the fig’s roots;

Let fires that rage to our north and south burn all remnants of hope;

Let hope’s attachment release and float pine trees’ incinerated bodies forward;

Let what we tried to mold with our calloused hands crumble against our tongues.

What we tried to erect out of ashes, out of a spring’s trickle, 

couldn’t sing with two hands, couldn’t fly 

into a mouth filled with past fears of burning, 

with a mind clogged with memories of loss. 

Watercress builds and gathers near a spring’s outlet;

blackberry vines grow unimpeded near a lake’s lips.

Let our promise move from a joining to a centering,

thrusting out from our powered center. 

Let our mind set on becoming more than one 

turn inward to clip any division, 

reform and align what we envision 

with what will grow from our fields 

that pop with lilting grasshoppers, 

splitting seed heads, bursting pinecones. 

……

This poem is from the book Break Self: Feed (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/break-self-feed-by-gabrielle-myers/

…..

Break Self: Feed meditates on eroticism and relationships with searing language play. The poems sing of our ecosystems, their human threats, and possible cures based on nourishment and barrier fracture. In eco-poetic lyrics, borderlands and boundaries evolve in reference to a deep connection with the natural world that surrounds us with its seasonal shifts and the impacts of climate change. We never know when abundance and satiation will come. We spend so much time preparing for devastation and desiccation, so much energy we waste planning our ruin. Beak Self: Feed repurposes that drive, energy, and time towards preparing for our proliferation, our unfurling, our living into our potential. Dig into the soil, feel loam and fine-webbed roots working out their networks of nutrient pull and harvest. Let’s mimic the roots motion to gather, see what it can get out of the perfect soil, set ourselves on expansion, lengthening, growth. 

Gabrielle is a writer, professor, and chef. Her memoir, Hive-Mind, published in 2015, details her time of love, awakening, and tragic loss on an organic farm. Her first poetry book, Too Many Seeds, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Her third poetry book, Points in the Network, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been published in the Atlanta Review, The Evergreen Review, The Adirondack Review, San Francisco Public Press, Fourteen Hills, pacificREVIEW, Connecticut River Review, Catamaran, MacQueen’s, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and is forthcoming from The American Poetry Review. Gabrielle is the Farm-to-Fork columnist for Inside Sacramento magazine. Access links to her work through her website at www.gabriellemyers.com